Writing Fail

I was going to write another post about short stories, but I’ve decided to write about my recent failures at writing instead, since that is more pertinent to my current life.

I’m dealing with a lot of drama (both good and bad) in both my extended and immediate families, which has really been affecting my motivation to write. There is an illness in the family and several relationship changes. That is coupled with the fact that there are just too many people that need me right now. I’m not the kind of person that does well with changes. And I’m not one of those writers that uses writing as a method for dealing with emotional turmoil. Instead, in order to write I need to be in a calm emotional place.

I haven’t been able to find my calm place recently. Sometimes I don’t have the time to write, but even when I do, I struggle to find the place that I can write from. Sit down and write is a good mantra,” but I just can’t make myself do it. And the more I try, the more upset I become, and the more distant my calm place gets.

It doesn’t help that I received two short story rejections in the same week. I always have emotional difficulty when that happens. When thinking about rejections in advance, I’m confident that I will be OK because I don’t actually expect things to get accepted. In reality, rejection always hurts. It doesn’t seem to matter that I have been getting rejected consistently for three years.

So my writing lately has really suffered. The only thing I’ve been able to do with brainstorm my story for NaNoWriMo. I’ve committed to trying to do NaNoWriMo to completion this year, but it’s very daunting. I wasn’t able to complete it last year, when I had a lot more time and motivation. How will I do it this year, with everything going on?

This isn’t the first time this is happened to me, and it won’t be the last. Even though in my depression I sometimes think I should give up writing, I recognize that that is a destructive thought, and I’m not going to do anything as drastic as deleting my writing folder or burning my manuscript. I’ll find that calm emotional place again soon. But I know from experience that trying to force it will just make the feeling last longer.

So that’s the state of my writing affairs right now. I’ll keep you all posted when or if things change.